Henny Acloque at the Ceri Hand Gallery

Henny Acloque at the Ceri Hand Gallery

Henny Acloque's second solo exhibition at the gallery features new paintings, (all 2011), that draw on her family's collections of auction catalogues and postcards featuring landscape paintings.The title Lugar de culto (Place of worship), reflects Acloque's investigation into our relationship to nature, the transfer of knowledge (public, private, between artists), and the consumption of art and objects.Continuing to appropriate the work of dead artists, Acloque forensically unpicks and reassembles the layers of each image she works from. She speaks of her paintings being "evidence of evidence of evidence".Paintings within auction catalogues from Christies, Sothebys and Bonhams were selected by Acloque for the artworks that featured landscapes with dwellings or ruins in them, representing lost ideologies and shifting power bases.

Colour plates such as "284 - Julius Caesar Ibbetson (1759- 1817), View of Hawthornden Castle with cattle drinking at a river and figures in foreground, £4000-£6000" or "287 - Circle of Richard Wilson (1713 - 1782), An Arcadian landscape with figures dancing by a river, a ruined castle beyond, £4000-6000" are re-presented by Acloque in oval shaped canvases, a recurring shape within the artists work.

Acrylic bound by resin, Acloque's glossy oval paintings speak of infinity, inferring that both the landscape and our ideologies expand and contract outside of the image (and the edges of a canvas).

Eliminating all figurative elements from the originals, Acloque enforces her own codes and systems to re-introduce 'characters' to the frozen worlds she paints. Utilising the colour of a cloth from a figure in the reproduction image, Acloque injects abstract swoops and strokes that wittily and darkly undermine and disrupt these fantastical visions.

All but two of the works from the auction catalogues series are small canvases, and allocated titles that refer to their original lot numbers, such as 287.

Presented within a towering room built inside the gallery, the contrasting scale of these smaller works set alongside two paintings at 72.8 x 100.4 in. sets up a further tension with our relationship to the represented landscape, interiority and the painting as object for consumption.

The other more recent small paintings draw on a collection of artists postcards discovered in a private room at her family home.

The artists' relationship to the landscape and figures within these facsimiles is charged and urgent, with broader, more aggressive brushstrokes commanding the landscape underneath.

This notion of 'owning' the painting is literally played out, with colours becoming fatter and more garish, suffocating and squeezing the image underneath.

In this new series of works, Acloque subtly prises open collections (and collectors) to reflect on how our changing world finds new meaning in their legacy and how changes in society, culture, and the economy have radically reshaped the meaning of objects and our relationships with them.

For a full list of works, images and more information on the exhibiting artists please visit contact Ceri Hand or Lucy Johnston on info@cerihand.co.uk or 0044 (0) 151 207 0899.